


those are pearls that were his eyes

by thingswithteeth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Eye Gouging, Eye Trauma, M/M, Mild Gore, just bad eye things, mostly happy, some sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 06:56:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20701802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: It might not fix anything.Itmight.Five-plus-one what-if scenarios after MAG 154.





	those are pearls that were his eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wildehack (tyleet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/gifts).

> I'm legitimately only about half responsible for this, it was the result of a lot of screaming in messenger yesterday.

The press of the knife against the corner of his eyelid is white hot heat, the kind of pain so intense that it’s almost not pain at all, a blazing precipice of agonizing sensation so deep that when he finally does look over the edge it almost isn’t anything, _pain_ blurring into nothing but _intensity, too much, cannot_.

He can. He will. Even if he doubted, the knife is already there, cold metal against skin and lash and vitreous, too late to turn back even if he wanted to. Even if he doubted, there is Martin’s hand in his hair, tangling hard enough to hurt, holding him still as he tries to flinch away.

“There, there,” Martin says, uselessly and so distant through the overwhelming _much_ of it that Jon can barely hear him at all. “Halfway there. Almost—.”

He stops speaking, but his hand slides down to cup Jon’s cheek, an aching tenderness of fingers against his skin that he can feel the way he can’t quite feel the place where his left eye used to be, the way he could feel Martin grasping his hair even as his mind had turned the throb of that great blank blinking spot where his eye _was was was_ into nothing but the rush of noise in his ears.

Something in his stomach clenches. He pretends it’s nauseous pain, rather than the cramping pain of a man already starving realizing he’ll never eat again. He tries to speak but his mouth is dry, tongue swollen and limp against the bitten rough insides of his cheeks and throat tight. Later, he will tell himself that had he found the words, he would have said _finish it_, rather than _stop, please, please, stop_. 

Martin’s fingers against his cheek are slick-warm, and he doesn’t know if it’s tears or blood or something worse. “Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t sound sorry he sounds _certain_, the way he had when telling Jon that all Jon had needed from him was an excuse _not to_. This is better, this is the promise of _together_ and _away_ and _never hurting anyone, ever again_, even if any and all of those things might prove to be lies. “Sorry, sorry. Almost there. Just hold on.”

He doesn’t take comfort in it. It is comforting. He trusts Martin. He has _decided_ to trust.

It’s not any better the second time.

When it is over, he sits there in the darkness, scrubbing his fingers over the hard edges of the table and the pilled wool of his jumper just to feel sure that he is not entirely adrift, that the world is still there. The pain has stopped being _was was was too much_ and has started to just be pain, and the back of his tongue tastes like blood.

His dry tongue tastes like wet blood, and he can speak again once he is done screaming (he is grateful that he couldn’t quite speak before, because he thinks that he might have said anything to make it stop, and he thinks that if he had said anything, he might have been able to say something to _make_ it stop). The words that come out sound like doubt. _You will not. You can’t. It will hurt too much_.

Martin laughs, and it sounds shaky, like the edge of a sob. “I will,” he says, soft and _certain_. “I can. I almost let you go. I almost saved the world. I can do anything.”

The Archivist—.

Jon believes him.

He hurts. Every part of him _hurts_, except for the once ever-gnawing pit of his belly, churning now in a queasy knot from the pain radiating out from between cheekbones and brows and—and nothing more.

The press of the knife against the corner of his eyelid is white hot heat, the kind of pain so intense that it’s almost not pain at all. 

When it is over, Martin cups his hands against Jon’s cheeks, presses his forehead against the blood and spit slick skin of Jon’s chin, and it hurts, it _hurts_, but it’s almost worth it, to have Martin here and present and not a million miles away even if there’s only two feet of space between them.

“You’re—” Jon says, when he can speak again.

“No,” Martin says, and it almost doesn’t come as a surprise (this is what he deserves, this is _right_), even as Jon can feel the yawning chasm of something that is not hunger open up in his stomach.

“You said,” he manages, around the swollen edges of his tongue, and it sounds like the plea of a child, one afraid of spiders and the way his grandmother’s mouth twists when he leaves his books spread out in a slowly collapsing pile on the living room carpet.

“I’m sorry,” Martin says, and he sounds sorry but he also sounds _certain_. “It’s better this way. I—I saved you. You can get out. And you were right, they can’t use you, not like this, but... I told you. Jon, I _told_ you that I need to see this through. Maybe—maybe after.”

His last words sound sorry. They don’t sound certain. They sound—.

They sound like nothing worth trusting. They sound like a lie.

For the first month, it’s—it’s not good, but it’s still better than anything Jon expected to have. Daisy helps him lay tactile tape along the floors of his flat, the lease newly signed in the weeks after Peter Lukas had delivered his termination papers. Melanie has been walking him through using voice commands with his phone with more patience than he would have anticipated. He suspects that she’s already making inquiries into ophthalmologists who might be willing to perform a non-recommended course of elective surgery. 

Good for her, he thinks, and he does not think of how before this, he wouldn’t have suspected, he would have _known_.

He adjusts better than he would have expected to not being able to see. There is Daisy, laughing (he pretends not to hear the way she loses her breath halfway through), and Melanie’s tentative hope, and Basira’s cautious trust, which most days he’s mostly not bitter about, that she can look at him and see something other than a monster only once his fangs have been pulled.

(He has not run into Helen, and he tries, very hard, not to think about how easy it would be now for him to wrap his fingers around the edge of a door and not mark its color or know that it had not been there only moments before.)

(There’s Martin, the brush of his hand against Jon’s hair in his room at night, quiet other than the whirring of the overhead fan, which Jon tries, very hard, not to compare to the buzz of insects. They’re out. They got out. There’s no reason for anything to come looking for them now.)

The first month passes, and it’s only then that he notices light at the edges of his vision, the way that distant glow brightens and fades and brightens again as the day lengthens and turns. By the time two months have gone, he can see shapes moving against the shadows, like afterimages against his eyelids after staring too long into the sun.

He should have known. He ought to have _known_. He hadn’t been able to cut flesh and bone from flesh and bone when he had needed it to guide Daisy out of the coffin, not without the Boneturner’s aid; there had been no reason to expect that this would take any better. 

Jon presses his face into the soft skin of Martin’s throat to block out the light. After a moment, he presses a kiss there, feels the way that Martin’s pulse jumps at the touch even two months gone. Tries to imagine that what he’s feeling is not relief.

“I can try again,” he murmurs, like a promise. He doesn’t sound certain; he can feel the old familiar hunger to _see_, to _know_ there in the way that he can glimpse the ghost of the spinning fan on the ceiling in the corners of his vision, and on his tongue his words taste like a lie. 

“I meant it,” Jon says, voice ragged with the afterimage of his own screams. “I meant e_very word_.” The corkscrew hangs loose in his fingers, slippery, and the only thing keeping it in his hand is the vague and insensible thought that to drop it onto the questionably clean floors of the Archives wouldn’t be _sanitary. _

(He hadn’t done it himself. He’d made the attempt, and this time it hadn’t been his own resilience that had kept him from succeeding, it had been the way that the tip of the corkscrew had refused to go softly out of focus as it ought to have as it approached his wide open eye, every gleaming edge of it sharp and clear and cutting. He’d lost his nerve. “I could try,” Melanie had said, her own eyes watchful and unwavering on his face, and this time he had not told her no.)

“Oh, Jon,” Martin says, and he sounds nothing but despairing, but there is something else there beneath the despair, something not quite so cold nor as _lonely_ as the last time they had spoken, something like cups of tea left on the edge of Jon's desk when he had least deserved them, and Jon doesn’t _Know_, but he _knows_.

It is well after dark when they knock on Doctor Lionel Elliot’s door.

The doctor’s eyes are red-rimmed and sleepless, and Jon doesn’t think it’s because they’ve woken him at half past one on a Monday. He does not look pleased to see Jon on his doorstep, but he lets them inside nonetheless, and he hears them out.

It had been Basira to insist that self-performed ocular surgery was perhaps not the way to go. Melanie had been the one to suggest that they comb through the Archives for a medical professional who might have had enough exposure to the weird and unnatural to appreciate their _extenuating circumstances_. Jon had been the one to remember Doctor Elliot, and Daisy had been able to lean hard enough on her few remaining contacts with the police to get a current address. 

Helen hadn’t understood, but she had provided them with a door, and promised, with more of herself in her spiraling eyes than Jon had seen in some time, that it would lead them where they wanted it to go.

She hadn’t lied.

Martin—.

Martin will do what he needs to do. Jon has decided to trust him, and if there is anyone who he trusts to handle the fate of the world, it’s Martin, but Jon has things he needs to do, too, and there are more people relying on him and the possibility of a way out than just Martin.

The empty spot in Jon’s stomach feels more like longing than like hunger, right in that moment.

“I can’t just—.”

“Wouldn’t you like,” Jon says, “not to see me in your dreams anymore, doctor?”

Lionel Elliot turns bloodshot eyes to Jon and is silent for a long time. Jon has more people relying on him and the possibility of a way out than just Martin. It’s a good reminder of that. 

“I was an orthopedic surgeon,” Elliot says, but it no longer sounds like a protest.

Jon looks at Basira, her arms crossed over her chest in the corner of the doctor’s kitchen, mouth set and gaze steady. He sees the moment she feels him watching, and her eyes meet his. Daisy is solid at his back, swaying and stubborn and so much there that he can almost imagine he feels the growl lodged in her throat caught in his own chest.

“I don’t care,” Basira says, and Jon hears Melanie release her breath, soft and stuttering but no less sure than the other two women he has traveled with here tonight.

“We don’t care,” Jon tells the doctor, and Elliot inclines his head in acknowledgement. His own eyes are wider than they were before, and Jon wonders—for the briefest of moments, Jon _knows_ what Elliot sees when he looks at them. He hopes that the doctor’s hands will be steady on the scalpel.

“I’ll arrange to have a surgery prepped in the morning,” Doctor Elliot says. “I—I think I would like to sleep without dreaming again."

Georgie drops them half a mile from the prison gates. 

“You’ll be all right,” she says, and she doesn’t say it like a question. Perhaps she’s too far away from her own fear to feel fretful, or perhaps she thinks that if she rattles it off like an instruction they’ll have to comply. Her eyes are all for Melanie, but when Jon pushes his aching body out of her car she catches his hand and gives it a quick, unthinking squeeze, and that’s—it’s unexpected but good, good enough to make his chest ache, good enough that had he had any doubts about the course of action he’s chosen, he might feel reassured.

He’s past doubts, now. He thinks that they all are.

Martin is watching them narrowly, and it’s almost enough to make Jon laugh, but he doesn’t. It feels too much like his initial impulse of what feels like half a lifetime ago, when he had first heard Melanie and Basira skirt coyly around the edges of what Martin feels for him, to dismiss it as something fleeting and foolish (cheeks flushed, tongue clumsy, not entirely convinced even then). He doesn’t laugh, just walks a little too close as they travel that final half mile and watches the way that Martin steals glances out of the corner of his eye, all the more precious and pleasing for—Jon hadn’t thought he’d see that again, one way or the other, he really hadn’t. The fog is thick, and that’s a decent reminder that this won’t—.

(“This won’t fix everything,” Daisy had told him, in the moments while Melanie and Basira had packed what they needed from the Archives and Georgie had pulled the car around. Her cheeks were too thin, lips chapped and eyes fever bright.

“I know,” he had said, and he had meant it, but he had also been unable to keep himself from thinking _but if we can fix this—_.)

Daisy is right. This isn’t going to fix everything. The world will still be ending. She’ll still be starving, and there’s no guarantee that he won’t be. Peter Lukas will still be a threat, and he’ll still have to wonder if the fog caught in Martin’s hair and glowing in the too-bright gleam of Melanie’s torch is only fog or a sign of something worse. This might not fix _anything_, but Jon is unaccustomed to hope, and he’s a lightweight; the promise of it is making him giddy and stupid, emotional champagne that rushes straight to his head. 

“Are you _giggling_?” Melanie asks, a little appalled and maybe a little appreciative. The hand that isn’t holding the torch is clenched by her side, clutching the only other tool she had thought necessary to take from the Archives.

“No,” Jon says, dignified and utterly unconvincing.

_“Christ,” _Melanie says.

“We’re almost there,” Basira says. He thinks she might be saying it to shut them up, because it’s another five minutes or more before they arrive at their destination. 

They enter the prison mostly unchallenged. The fog chases Martin down the halls; most people don’t look at them at all. Jon meets the gaze of the one guard who steps forward to meet them, coaxes a story out of her and tries not to feel too guilty, because if he’s right, _if he’s right_, then soon it won’t matter.

Elias is waiting for them.

“Jon,” he says. “I’ve been expecting you.” Jon knows enough now, and has learned enough from Basira, to wonder if Elias really had, or if he’s just playing at omnipotence, the deposed king in exile until the time comes for him to seek his crown once again. He still knows _something_, however, because his next words are, “So, you’ve heard Mr. Delano’s statement. I hope you don’t think—.”

“He _did_,” Martin said, faint and disapproving and so much like the Martin that Jon had known that it makes his throat go tight and speechless for a moment.

It hardly matters, because he’s not the only one with something to say. “Got that sorted,” Basira says, and if she still looks a little like she would rather use her fists then she also looks perfectly content to lean her shoulder against the wall of Elias’s cell, calm and collected and in control. “No need to worry. Jon won’t be putting his eyes out anytime soon.”

Elias leans back on his bunk. “Then why are you _here_?”

“We got to talking,” Melanie says.

“Your friend down at the Archives must’ve hated that,” Daisy murmurs. Melanie shoots her a reproachful look for interrupting. Elias just shrugs.

“As long as you didn’t try to talk to _him_, he’s probably fine.”

_“We got to talking_,” Melanie says pointedly, “and we started to wonder—well. If an archival employee can sever their contract by giving up their eyes, denying _you_ a way to see, what happens if...”

She doesn’t finish her thought. She doesn’t really have to. The item she has carried all the way from the Institute’s tiny kitchen is held aloft in her upraised hand: a grapefruit spoon, a little dull along the edges and water-stained from going through the wash.

“She tried to bring the ice cream scoop,” Basira says, with a small shrug. She sounds a bit apologetic, but she’s also clearly directing that apology to the rest of them rather than Elias. “I told her it was a little too gruesome. No one needs to see that.” 

“Grapefruit spoon is better for taking eyes out anyway,” Daisy says. She does not explain how she knows. No one asks. Her gaze is still burning bright above her hollowed out cheeks.

“What happens,” Martin says, slow and distinct and as remote as Peter Lukas has made him, “if _your_ contract is severed, Elias? You’re the beating heart of the Magnus Institute, after all. Who enforces our employment contracts, if not you? Do they even exist without you?”

Jon watches with ravenous eyes the way that Elias’ throat moves as he swallows.

It might not fix anything. 

It _might_.

“Well,” Elias Bouchard says, “_fuck_.”

**Author's Note:**

> The alternate summary for this story was "five times Jon poked his own eyes out and one time found family and a grapefruit spoon won the day" and I'm not sorry.
> 
> Come say hi on [Tumblr](https://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/).


End file.
